At INFODAD, we rank everything we review with plus signs, on a scale from one (+) [disappointing] to four (++++) [definitely worth considering]. We mostly review (+++) or better items. Very rarely, we give an exceptional item a fifth plus. We are independent reviewers and, as parents, want to help families learn which books, music, and computer-related items we and our children love...or hate. INFODAD is a service of TransCentury Communications, Inc., Fort Myers, Florida, infodad@gmail.com.

Herpetology, the scientific study
of reptiles and amphibians, doesn’t garner much attention in books for young
readers, but the ups and downs of people with herps, or people who are herps, provide a lot of
entertainment. Vivian Vande Velde takes her own unique and rather dark view of
fairy tales into Frogged, the
umpteenth version of the Grimm fairy tale of The Frog Prince and one of many modern retellings in which the
kissing of the frog doesn’t do quite what it should. Here, Princess Imogene,
fresh from being bored by being required to read a book called The Art of Being a Princess, encounters
a talking frog that claims to be a bewitched prince despite being ill-mannered
and not very well-spoken. Imogene, who has a good heart, kisses the frog to
break the spell, and finds herself
turned into a frog – a no-longer-unusual twist on the old story. But this is a
Vande Velde book, not a sweet Disney retelling such as The Princess and the Frog, the 2009 movie in which two companion
frogs need to find themselves, find each other and find true love. It turns out
that the transformed-into-a-frog character was not a prince at all, but a mere
commoner and a rather nasty one to boot, who ran afoul of a witch by treating
her rather foully, and who fully deserved to be frogged. But the spell under which
he was placed, while it could be broken by someone kissing the frog, would turn
the kisser into a frog while transforming the kissee back to a (rather
unpleasant) human. This seems pretty unfair, especially to Imogene, who, having
experienced frogginess, does not want to turn someone else into a frog through a kiss. She tries to persuade the boy,
Harry, to help her get to the witch so she can try to cajole the magic wielder
into reversing the spell; but Harry does not care at all and goes on his merry
and unconcerned way, leaving Imogene thoroughly frogged and unable to make the
long trip (for a frog) to the witch’s home, much less back to her parents’
castle.And then there’s the traveling
theater troupe. What is that doing
here? Well, Vande Velde at her best and most amusing (which she is in Frogged) pulls the story this way and
that, testing out its directions and limits until she finds how to shape it
just right. Think of it as a taffy pull with words.Imogene, it turns out, has a long way to go
and a lot of growing-up to do before she will have a chance to live happily
ever after; and while it spoils nothing to reveal that she does get her happy ending, it would spoil quite a bit to explain
how. Finding out requires a hop, skip and jump into Frogged for a refreshing dip into silly absurdity that nevertheless
has some heart and soul at its core. Amphibians such as frogs are often wrongly
said to be cold-blooded (untrue: they simply heat their bodies from external
sources rather than an internal furnace like the one we mammals have); but the
cold-bloodedness in Frogged lies not
in the frog but in some of the surrounding humans, while the warmth and
amusement of the book penetrate just about everywhere.

The herp in Boris Gets a Lizard is, of course, a
lizard, not a frog, but what kind of
lizard it turns out to be is what the book is all about. The first two Boris
books are in Scholastic’s new “Branches” line, which offers easy-to-read,
nicely illustrated chapter books that are more substantial than early chapter
books from other publishers. Andrew Joyner’s Boris is an anthropomorphic pig,
somewhat more bristly than pigs usually are in children’s books, and he has a
taste for books, sports, pets, and big dreams. In the first Boris book, Boris on the Move, lizards make a couple
of cameo appearances: a small one when Joyner introduces Boris and a big one in
one of Boris’ imagined adventures. The real
adventure here, though, is suitably small. Boris lives with his parents in an
old bus that no longer goes anywhere but that his folks used to use to travel
the world – they seem to be upright-standing porcine hippies who have now
settled down. Realizing that Boris is unhappy about never going anywhere, his
parents get the bus going again one day and take Boris on a trip to a nearby
“conservation park,” where he gets separated from them and encounters something
coming through the bushes – not, however, a dangerous beast (or even a herp),
but a quickly adopted pet to add to the family. Then, in Boris Gets a Lizard, Boris’ big dreams lead him to ask the local
zoo to let him borrow a Komodo dragon – the world’s largest lizard – instead of
the small skink that he actually has as one of his pets. Certain that the
Komodo dragon will soon be visiting him, Boris, who has been regaling his class
with Komodo dragon stories every Tuesday, makes preparations at home and
invites everyone to come see the huge reptile when it arrives. But of course it
doesn’t, and Boris has to work his way through the self-created misunderstanding
and mend fences with all his friends – which he does quite neatly. A zoo visit
lets Boris and friends actually see a Komodo dragon, and a snake and skink have
cameo roles in this book as well, and the whole thing is a pleasantly happy and
herpy adventure in a series that looks as if it will appeal to a great many
early readers.

There is always some
additional grist for the entertainment mill in the antics and excesses of
Hollywood, where for the past century overpaid and under-talented people with
the right appearance and sufficient deficiency of scruples have become
America’s version of royalty – until they go too far and audiences move on to the next person who is famous for
being famous. The Klise sisters have a great deal of fun with Hollywood
stereotypes – and remember that stereotyping exists because it is, at some
level, an accurate portrayal – in their fifth visit to 43 Old Cemetery Road. This is the house in Ghastly, Illinois, where
author Ignatius B. Grumply and ghost Olive C. Spence live with their adopted
son, Seymour Hope, whose name (“see more hope”) is but one of the entirely
apposite appellations in Hollywood, Dead
Ahead. As always in this series, the book is told through printed matter:
letters (the only way Olive can communicate with the living), newspapers,
scandal sheets, even a transcription of a climactic movie scene. In this book
are a slimy, scheming studio owner named Moe Block Busters (“more
blockbusters”); his even slimier and more-scheming assistant, Myra Manes (“my
remains,” with a pun on “mane” as hair, which turns out to be important); and
his almost-equally-slimy would-be successor as studio head, Phillip D. Rubbish
(self-explanatory). There is also a 92-year-old star who has won every
Hollywood award except an Oscar and is therefore named Ivana Oscar. And there
are Luke Ahtmee (“look at me”), image-makeover specialist, and tooth-makeover
specialist dentist Dr. Miles Smyle, and (back home in Ghastly) an overreaching and
overconfident handyman named Hugh Briss (“hubris”) who gets his comeuppance, or
come-downance, in the end. The rollicking plot has Iggy, Olive and Seymour
cheated out of their work by Moe Block Busters, who is determined to create a
film that instead of featuring Olive will be about an evil ghost named Evilo
(“Olive” spelled backwards). A horrendous contract and ridiculous makeovers
combine to infuriate and depress Iggy and Seymour, while an even worse contract
including a “death clause” almost makes the awful movie into Ivana Oscar’s
final performance, until eventually the tables are appropriately turned and
everything works out all right for everyone except the bad guys, Hugh Briss,
and FAA inspector Don Worrie, who may tell travelers “don’t worry” but who finds
Olive’s presence on flights both worrisome and puzzling. Self-referential
newspaper ads about upcoming movies and new chapters of (what else?) 43 Old Cemetery Road add to the fun in a
book that shows there is certainly no place like home, or if there is, it
certainly isn’t Hollywood.

Still, the allure of
Hollywood – all that fame, all that money – is never-ending, and the fact that
there is something juvenile about all the grabbiness and self-importance merely
means that Hollywood wannabes are good subjects for books for young readers.
Say, ones about 13 years old – which is the age of Sean Rosen in Jeff Baron’s
debut novel (although Baron has previously written plays and screenplays).I
Represent Sean Rosen is a typical Hollywood tale, G-rated for the
readership at which it is targeted, with some cleverness in presentation and an
underlying premise that isn’t nearly as far-fetched as you might think when you
first hear it: Sean has a blockbuster script to sell to Hollywood (where
scripts do seem to have been mostly written by 13-year-olds), but he knows he
can’t do it on his own and needs an agent/manager…so he invents one named Dan
Welch. And grabs an E-mail address for DanWelchManagement. And is quickly off
and running, complete with podcasts and meetings via Skype and the Web site www.SeanRosen.com (which, not surprisingly,
really exists, as part of the is-this-reality-or-isn’t-it premise of the book).
So Sean makes his lists (“when I have a lot to do, I make a list”), keeps up
minimally with his school work, and stays focused where he really wants to focus: “The movie idea. I love movies. How hard can
it be to come up with one? It’s not like I actually have to make a movie by tomorrow. Or even write
a script for a movie by tomorrow. All I need for tomorrow is an idea for a
movie. Or a series of movies.” And of course Sean wows everybody with his
concept, A Week with Your Grandparents,
which the Hollywood types like because (like most Hollywood movies) it is a
little bit of one successful film and a little bit of another and is slightly
different but not so different that
anybody would have to, you know, take a real chance and get creative and maybe
lose his or her job if the thing crashed and burned. Well, all goes swimmingly
for Sean, who inevitably discovers that without creativity – and, more
specifically, creative control – his vision will not be his anymore, so he learns an important lesson and finds tremendous
success in ways that really count. And makes a bunch of money in the process. I Represent Sean Rosen isn’t quite
satirical or sarcastic enough to be as funny as Baron seems to want it to be,
and it isn’t all that unusual on the wish-fulfillment scale, either. But this
(+++) book is well-paced, written to be super-easy to read, and enjoyable both
in itself and through its online tie-ins. The total cluelessness of Sean’s
parents, typical enough in books of this sort, is overdone, and an eventual
twist in which Sean finds out why his father never finished college does not
evoke the emotion that it seems designed to bring out. But most readers of more-or-less
Sean’s age will simply enjoy the fantasy here and not look too closely at the
plot or the very thin characterizations. And that, come to think of it, means
that I Represent Sean Rosen fits into
Hollywood thinking very well indeed.

Drunk Tank Pink and Other
Unexpected Forces That Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave. By Adam Alter.
Penguin. $25.95.

The Happiest Baby Guide to Great
Sleep: Simple Solutions for Kids from Birth to 5 Years. By Harvey Karp,
M.D. William Morrow. $15.99.

“At its heart,” writes Adam
Alter in Drunk Tank Pink, “this book
is designed to show that your mind is the collective end point of a billion
tiny butterfly effects,” referring to meteorologist Edward Lorenz’ famous talk
suggesting that the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil might set off a
tornado in Texas. Alter’s assertion of a wholly deterministic model for human
thinking and response is something of a Holy Grail for an assistant professor
in the marketing department of the Stern School of Business in New York City –
which is what Alter is. After all, if one’s mind, one’s thinking and one’s
reaction pattern are created by minuscule circumstances distant in time or
place from where one happens to be, then there must be a way for marketers to
harness the butterfly effect and use it to shove more consumer products of
dubious value down people’s unwitting throats – and have the people, thinking
they bought the products for their own good reasons, thank the marketers for
“alerting” them to the great benefits of the oobleck of the month. Not that
Alter puts things so crassly – not by a long shot. In fact, Drunk Tank Pink is an utterly
fascinating study in science and pseudo-science, a remarkable journey through
experiments that certainly demonstrate that influencers on humans are disparate
and widespread and frequently unconscious – even if it does not show purveyors
of crass commercialism how to harness human thought and emotion consistently
(yet).

The book’s title refers to a
specific shade of pink that was discovered in the 1970s to reduce aggression,
and that soon began to be used in places where unruly prisoners were kept, in
an attempt to calm them. Then it caught on for other purposes: on seats in bus
waiting areas to reduce vandalism, in visiting teams’ locker rooms to try to
give an edge to home teams, and so on. And does it work? Well….maybe. This book
is full of “well, maybe” thoughts presented with a touch too much certainty –
or perhaps a touch too much intensive marketing. Much of what Alter discusses
is so interesting that it is worth reading even if his conclusions are
questionable. There is, for example, an amazing study of chess grandmasters –
about as controlled, rational and cerebral a bunch of humans as you are likely
to find. Researchers discovered that because heterosexual male chess players,
like other heterosexual males, produce more testosterone in the presence of
attractive women, they tend unconsciously to adopt riskier gambits when playing
such women than when playing other men. In a related experiment designed to
find out whether men’s response to attractive females is caused by sexual
desire or merely by distraction, researchers – yes, different ones – discovered
that the tipping pattern of men who received lap dances from topless women was
fascinatingly different based on elements of the women’s behavior that the men
could not know: if the women were not using oral contraceptives, they
consistently earned larger tips during their monthly fertile phase than at any
other time of the month, while if they were
taking birth-control pills, they earned about the same amount throughout the
month. The pill really did regularize their cycles – financial as well as
menstrual. And what is the point of all this, assuming findings like these
cannot (yet) be harnessed for marketing purposes? There may be no real “point”
in terms of practical applicability of all the research that Alter cites, and
in fact the real-world value of it is questionable: would an angry person in a
bar be less likely to slug someone wearing a “drunk tank pink” shirt because of
the shirt’s color, or more likely to
attack because of some imagined association with the color, such as
homosexuality? Outside the laboratory, there is no real way to know. But when a
“laboratory” can be a “gentlemen’s club” in Albuquerque (where the lap-dancing
study was conducted), and when experiments can show that responses to an
identical cartoon panel are very different between Japanese and Americans
because of cultural differences involving individualism and collectivism, then
there are certainly lessons of some
sort to be learned from Drunk Tank Pink.
The thing is that, by Alter’s own argument, each reader’s response is likely to
be wholly different from that of the next reader, since the confluence of
events bringing each reader to and through the book is likely to be deterministically
different. There is something philosophical to be garnered here, even if
philosophy is scarcely Alter’s interest. Whatever that something may be,
however it may vary from reader to reader, it is worth exploring and thinking
about, because the experiments that Alter recounts are absolutely fascinating
even if their implications are, like the effects of a butterfly’s wings,
uncertain and ultimately unknowable.

Behavioral issues are far
more down-to-earth and have far more immediacy for the parents of young
children, and that is Harvey Karp’s milieu. The paperback edition of The Happiest Baby Guide to Great Sleep,
available now – a year after the original hardcover publication – will be a
great find for parents whose own
sleep is constantly interrupted by infant and toddler sleep difficulties. There
are time-tested ways of handling middle-of-the-night infant-sleep issues, from
rocking chairs to walking around the house cuddling the baby to taking a
nighttime drive. Those approaches sometimes work, sometimes do not, but have
the disadvantage that even if they do succeed where the child is concerned,
they result in parents being
sleep-deprived and starting the next morning exhausted, bleary-eyed and
mentally dull. This is not a recipe for success in either work or parenting –
and repeating the behavior night after night, resulting in exhaustion day after
day, only makes matters worse.

Karp, a pediatrician and
child-development specialist, is a sort of one-man baby-advice factory, and is
not above reminding readers of it: “If you’ve seen my DVDs and books, you’ll
recognize some old favorite techniques…”“You can find a detailed demonstration and discussion of the calming reflex and 5 S’s in The Happiest Baby DVD or digital
download.” And he has a folksy style that may take some getting used to: “Most
new moms notice that their memory turns to mush right after giving birth (or
even a few months before).” “Once you have your S’s in place, here are
additional cues that will make your little one’s nighty-night routine even more
comforting.”About those S’s: they stand
for specific things (swaddling, side/stomach, shushing, swinging and sucking),
but Karp is enamored of the 19th letter of the alphabet throughout
this book: “Setting the Stage,” “Soothing Your Sweetie,” “A Short, Sweet,
Sacred Time,” “Another S: Smell,” “Sleep Schedules,” “Sleep Success,” and so
forth. There is nothing wrong with this same sort of stylistic stuff if you
happen to like it, but it does tend to become cloying and overly cute after a
while.

The basic ideas here,
though, are so good that potential irritation with the presentation fades
quickly into the background. Karp divides his book into four sections: birth to
three months, three to 12 months, one to five years, and a final section on
“special situations” (sigh). He presents graphs and charts, explanations of how
sleep changes over a person’s life, and very useful Q&A sections for each
age range. He discusses subjects such as “state control,” the level of a baby’s
awareness at any particular point in time, and how you can use knowledge of
your baby’s alertness to improve his or her sleep; and he offers a variety of
experiments and demonstrations to show just how processes such as state control
work. He spends pages and pages exploding various myths about babies and sleep.
For example, one myth is that “sleeping babies need us to tiptoe around,” but
the reality is that “you may like
sleeping in peace and quiet, but for your baby, it’s really weird!” There are
discussions of swaddling, having your baby sleep in your bed, sleep positions,
use of white noise (the right kind of white noise; Karp explains what works and
what does not), and how developmental stages change sleep patterns and should
change parental response to them. A number of Karp’s statements will be
counterintuitive – for instance, “the best time to start your bedtime routine
is in the morning!” But Karp always
explains why these ideas, even if startling, are not only correct but also
important for a better sleep experience for children – which translates into a
better one for long-suffering parents. There is a lot of information here, and
the layout of the book is somewhat overdone, with bullet points, subsections,
subheads, boxes of information, question sections, illustrations and other
design elements tumbling over each other to the point of confusion (especially
for parents who are sleep-deprived). However, the “Crib Notes” (one cutesy
phrase among many) provide a good place to begin: they appear at chapter ends
and summarize what has been discussed, and can be a good starting point that can send you back into the chapter for
more-in-depth understanding of Karp’s ideas. The Happiest Baby Guide to Great Sleep is perhaps a little too full
of itself, but it is also full of intelligent and very useful suggestions whose
value will be quickly established for exhausted, overstressed parents for whom
a good night’s sleep – the adult kind – is wholly dependent on their baby’s
restful slumber.

For many decades, comic strips
were almost entirely about action, from the Katzenjammer Kids’ antics to Ignatz
continually throwing bricks at Krazy Kat’s head. Over time, though, some
cartoonists realized that they could build strips around language and ideas,
not solely activity: Walt Kelly’s Pogo
was the greatest example of this, and G.B. Trudeau’s Doonesbury carries on the approach today. In addition, a few
cartoonists – very few – discovered a way to make a kind of gentle sweetness
the main ingredient in their work, using spare writing and modest action (if
any) to communicate a relaxing and fascinating alternative world to which
readers would be delighted to pay repeated visits. There is no better exemplar
of this gentle cartooning style than Patrick McDonnell, whose Mutts is as sweet as can be but also
makes a number of points very skillfully – about human-animal relationships,
animal adoption, environmental issues and more. There is all of this in the
latest splendid Mutts “Treasury”
volume, Bonk! For example, Earl the
dog and Mooch the cat find the perfect place to hibernate: in front of the
counter at Fatty Snax Deli. Mooch continues his adoration of the “little pink
sock.” McDonnell’s opening panels for his Sunday strips – optional drawings that
many newspapers do not use – are drawn with tremendous care, cleverness and
understanding of both comic art and fine art. The recurring “Shelter Stories”
sequence shows just how perfectly matched animals and their humans can be,
whether a singing woman brings home a singing bird or a yoga lover takes home a
cat that stretches with ease in yoga-like postures.The extent to which Mutts differs from classic strips – and the extent to which
McDonnell’s understanding of those earlier comics is superb – show when
McDonnell deliberately recalls those strips in a series called “Klassic
Komics.” One, “Little Orphan Shtinky,” features both Shtinky the cat and Earl
with wide, all-white eyes, Earl proclaiming “Arf!” while Shtinky says “Leapin’
Lizards!” – two of the hallmark phrases of Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie. Another, “Little Mooch in Slumberland,”
features Mooch falling out of a bed taken straight from Winsor McCay’s
brilliant Little Nemo in Slumberland.
And comics are not the only classics that get McDonnell’s wonderful treatment. For
example, there are readings from Mother Goose – by a goose – and tributes to
Spider-Man, Doctor Strange and other characters. “Prof. Mooch” teaches class
his unique way in one series here, while Jules (also known as Shtinky) dreams
of India and a chance to meet a cobra, tiger, even a dancing bear that is a
tribute to Baloo in the Disney animated version of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. McDonnell is immensely
knowing, even erudite, when it comes to art and comics, but there is not a
scintilla of arrogance about him as he takes readers, day after day, to and
through a gently surreal landscape of animals in which the strangest beasts,
most of the time, are the humans.

Lincoln Peirce’s Big Nate is a much more traditional
pratfalls-and-other-kinds-of-action strip, targeted at younger readers than is Mutts: Peirce (pronounced “purse”)
creates mainly for preteens like Nate Wright himself. Nate is 11 in Big Nate Out Loud, a collection that has
been around since 2011 but is now available with all strips in color and a
pull-out poster of the book’s cover in the back. Here, it turns out that Nate,
for all his overdone sense of self-importance, has a clever way of persuading
teachers to hold class outdoors on a nice day; possesses a remarkable but
selective memory (he has total recall for pop-culture facts but cannot remember
anything school-related); and is the school’s “nickname czar,” explaining that
“a good nickname works on many
levels.”Also in this volume, Nate – a
total slob, albeit one who can find anything in the complete junk heap that
emerges whenever he opens his locker – is hypnotized into becoming neat, and
soon drives everyone crazy with his transformation; and starts a rock band, but
sings so badly that he is soon demoted to tambourine player (with Artur, the
super-nice character whose unending courtesy drives Nate crazy, becoming lead
singer).There are no grand societal
themes in Big Nate; indeed, there is
no major exploration of anything of consequence.And that is a big part of the strip’s charm:
it is determinedly old-fashioned in many ways, with plenty of silliness and
lots of action of the “stuffed locker spewing junk” and “trouble with teachers”
types. Yet Big Nate has enough of a
contemporary feel and enough goofiness in Nate himself and in the supporting
cast to be a great deal of fun, day in and day out, without a shred of
profundity.

Steve Björkman’s cartoony illustrations for Dirt on My Shirt are very much action-oriented,
too, and are the primary attraction of this (+++) book featuring poems by Jeff
Foxworthy. Foxworthy is a bit like Nate Wright in his apparent sense of himself
as better at humorous poetry than he actually is. There is certainly nothing
wrong with the poems, especially short ones such as “Wishing and Fishing,”
whose four lines go: “I was just wishing that I could go fishing/ What I might
catch I don’t know/ A shark or a whale, or a fish with no tail/ No matter
’cause I’ll let ’em go.” But the deliberately crowded illustration within which
the words appear – showing water creatures of all sorts, shapes and colors – is
creative in a way that makes the poem seem ho-hum.Likewise, the illustrations for “Noises” are
much funnier than a poem in which Foxworthy, needing a rhyme for “fire truck in
a hurry,” comes up with “my baby brother Murray” (well, it does rhyme).Again and
again, the pictures here make the comparatively ordinary poems into something
special. “Staring Contest” shows a boy and cat with equally bugged-out eyes and
faces almost touching – and words that begin, “I am staring at my cat/ He
doesn’t bat an eye.” “Uninvited Guests” features big-eyed, smiling squirrels
swarming all over a bird feeder and the tree to whose branch it is attached.
“What Do You See?” is a real gem: a simple poem naming things that are easily
visible in a pleasant outdoor scene goes with a two-page illustration that not
only contains the items specified in the words but also includes many more
things to find – as explained on the book’s copyright page. Dirt on My Shirt is mildly amusing and
enjoyable to read, and some of Foxworthy’s ideas are especially pleasant – such
as his notion of escaped balloons rising to Heaven for little angels to play
with. But it is really Björkman’s
illustrations that make the book so much fun – as in the body language and
expressions of those angels. Some of the pictures here are gentle, some are
full of activity, and all fit the subject matter completely and lovingly.

The coming of spring
invariably brings, in books, the coming of springtime stories, and in
particular Easter tales – mostly of the secular type. Pure springtime fun with
the delightful chick Peepsqueak is to be found in Peepsqueak Wants a Friend! This is the second book of this
character’s adventures after the eponymous first one. Leslie Ann Clark has a
winner of adorableness here: wearing a red shirt with the initials “P.S.,”
Peepsqueak is interminably optimistic and ever-determined to succeed at
whatever modest goal he sets for himself. In Peepsqueak Wants a Friend! the goal is clear from the title:
noticing that the other chicks are all “2 by 2,” but he is not, Peepsqueak
decides to go into the woods and find a friend all his own. He keeps running
into paired animals, including hedgehogs, birds and raccoons, and insists on
continuing deeper into the forest – because he is following a set of VERY LARGE
footprints that he is sure will lead him to a friend. Any possible scariness of
the footprints is minimized by the narration, in which Clark repeatedly says
that “Peepsqueak hopped, skipped, jumped, and skittered down the path,” with
the four verbs in four different colors. Eventually coming to a cave where the
footprints end, Peepsqueak calls loudly for the friend who, he is sure, is just
inside – and sure enough, the huge creature in the cave is only too happy to be
his friend, albeit only after some considerable startling of Peepsqueak’s fellow
farm animals. A silly, pleasant springtime romp, Peepsqueak Wants a Friend! is a delight for ages 4-8.

The latest Marley adventure,
for the same age range, is a particularly enjoyable one, thanks largely to Richard
Cowdrey’s hyper-dynamic illustrations. All of Marley and the Great Easter Egg Hunt is fast – page after page has
Marley in action and his family (and other people) in startled reaction, as the
adorable but ever-misbehaving dog constantly zooms here and there after this
and that. The main “this and that” things here are, of course, Easter eggs: the
irrepressible Marley insists on helping Cassie in the town’s official hunt, and
indeed manages to find egg after egg. But he is so far ahead of Cassie that by
the time she catches up, someone else has found and taken every single egg that
Marley first spotted. “Where’s that crazy dog going now?” asks Daddy at one
point, and Cowdrey’s pictures certainly make Marley look, if not crazy, at
least hyper-enthusiastic and constantly excited. The twist in John Grogan’s
story involves one special Easter egg, which the mayor says is large but not
easy to find. Readers will know that Marley will eventually be the one to find
it and win the hunt, but how he finds
it is the fun here. And it is very messy fun, as Marley discovers non-hardboiled
eggs in a market and breaks them all over himself, then rushes into a bakery
and gets covered with purple frosting, then runs through a large, egg-shaped
piñata and emerges covered with
confetti, which sticks to the frosting and egg. Marley is a mess, but of course
he is an adorable one, looking like a decorated Easter egg himself as he
continues to outrun his family and all the other townsfolk. But even Marley
slows down eventually, and the way he very sloppily discovers the special
Easter egg is pure Marley and pure fun.

Two (+++) series books, also for ages 4-8,
offer Easter-themed entries as well, and if they are not quite as enjoyable as
Marley’s latest story, they will be fun for kids who already like these
specific characters and approaches. Mia:
The Easter Egg Chase features the ballerina kitten in a much milder egg
hunt than Marley’s. Mia gives some special help to little cousin Sophie, who
cannot get to the eggs as quickly as the other cousins do. Mia’s niceness pays
off for everyone, including Mia herself, with Robin Farley’s helpfulness
message nicely set off by the illustrations by Olga and Aleksey Ivanov. A
bound-in page of stickers adds to the enjoyment here: most of them are Easter
eggs, and the book’s final page shows Mia’s back yard, where readers can “hide”
them. And hiding and finding things – in particular, a golden egg – is the
whole point of Easter Bunny on the Loose!
This is in the “Seek and Solve Mystery” series, books with big and crowded
pages in Where’s Waldo? mode, with
six “suspects” shown at the beginning and the Easter Bunny acting as detective,
assembling clues. The idea is to find the Easter bunny on each page – amid
many, many other bunnies and lots and lots of things going on – and piece
together the clues that the Easter bunny finds, one by one.Wendy Wax’s text is simple and
straightforward, but Dave Garbot’s super-busy illustrations contain surprises
here and there, beyond the “find it” one – for example, the chocolate Easter
rabbit that seems (from its expression) to be an actual bunny inadvertently
covered in chocolate. Eventually the Easter bunny finds all the clues and
discovers the culprit, who – as usual in these books – meant well and was not
really a thief but just someone planning a surprise that went awry. Once the
mystery is solved, though, there is little reason for kids to re-read the book,
although the inside back cover’s “bonus search” does suggest looking for some
additional items in the pictures. And kids who enjoy brightly colored and very elaborate
art may also have fun returning to Easter
Bunny on the Loose! For others, it will be a one-time-use seasonal treat.

Most people today use the
word “passion” in a strictly secular sense, but the word has a much deeper
meaning in religion, referring to the physical, mental and spiritual suffering
of Jesus – and, by extension, of others – in the hours before death. And there
is no more-intense musical passion in this sense, none more passionately (in
any sense) created, than Bach’s St.
Matthew Passion. A work that needs no visual support and one with which
visuals can actually interfere in a recording, distracting listeners/viewers
from the music’s depth and core meaning, the St. Matthew Passion rarely gets a visual presentation of such high
quality as to merit serious purchase consideration by Bach lovers. But it gets
one from John Nelson and the forces under his command. Soli Deo Gloria – Latin
for “glory to God alone,” a phrase Bach himself employed to explain why he
wrote his music – has produced a remarkably fine two-DVD set in which all the
soloists sing with dramatic intensity and a feeling of spiritual fervor, the
choral parts are delivered with equal understanding of the words and of Baroque
style, and the orchestral playing is simply wonderful – supportive always,
taking the lead when it should, supple and energetic and heartfelt
throughout.Werner Güra is highly expressive as the
narrator, the Evangelist, while Stephen Morscheck manages to emphasize the
human side of Jesus while never downplaying his inherent divine nature. The
other soloists, their vocal ranges appropriately reflecting the total span of
the human voice, are uniformly excellent. And so is the clarity of the
high-definition recording, in which director Louise Narboni manages to keep the
video of this live performance from 2011as unintrusive into a
listener’s/viewer’s experience as it can be. Narboni also directs a 52-minute
bonus video that is much more down-to-earth than the performance: it features
rehearsals of the work and discussions of it by Nelson, who clearly has a
strong affinity for the music and the skill to bring out what he knows. This is
a first-rate performance in which the video elements, far from undermining the
work’s effectiveness, actually enhance it – and that is a real rarity.

The All-Night Vigil by Rachmaninoff is something of a rarity, too, being
performed and recorded far less often than Rachmaninoff’s symphonies, piano
concertos and other instrumental music. And this piece is fascinating to hear
on Ondine’s very well-recorded SACD with the Latvian Radio Choir under Sigvards
Kļava. This is an a cappella work in which Rachmaninoff
took to heart what was at the time (1915) a Russian Orthodox Church
proscription against the use of instruments in sacred music. Sometimes
incorrectly called Vespers – only the
first six of its 15 movements are settings of texts from the Russian Orthodox
canonical hour of Vespers – this was one of Rachmaninoff’s own favorite pieces,
and he asked that the fifth movement be sung at his funeral. The work is
written in three different styles of chant, and depends heavily on the quality
of the very low bass voices for which Rachmaninoff wrote the foundational
parts. The Latvian Radio Choir’s basses are not as deep and resonant as some
heard in earlier recordings, including the very first, made in 1965 under
Alexander Sveshnikov. But they are strong and quite expressive, and indeed the
expressiveness of the entire ensemble is what makes this recording so special.
The harmonization is particularly good here – Rachmaninoff creates up to
eight-part harmony and, in one section, 11-part – and the voices interweave
with strength and emotional commitment throughout. Strictly speaking, this is
not a religious “passion,” for although it focuses largely on Jesus and
eventually proclaims his triumphant resurrection, it does not dwell on his last
hours and martyrdom. But the work has plenty of passion in the “intensity”
sense, and is delivered in this recording with style, attentiveness to detail,
and a fine sense of choral balance and emotional commitment.

On another new Ondine SACD,
the traditional religious sense of “passion” is embodied in the title of La Passion de Simone by Kaija Saariaho
(born 1952). Like Rachmaninoff’s All-Night Vigil, this work has 15 parts,
here called “stations,” with an obvious reference to the “stations of the cross.”
Indeed, Saariaho links episodes of Simone Weil’s life to those stations – but
the fact that the work is about Weil rather than Jesus or a more-typical martyr
gives La Passion de Simone a
distinctly modern slant. So does the fact that Saariaho employs electronic as
well as conventional instruments. Weil (1909-1943) was something of an
aberration among modern left-wing intellectuals, increasingly embracing
religion over time and genuinely living out her beliefs. Indeed, her death at
age 34 was in a sense a suicide, since she deliberately restricted her food
intake because of her feelings about the near-starvation endured by so many during
World War II. Weil was a darling of the Left through the 1960s and remains
popular in some quarters at universities, especially in Europe. Certainly her
increasing religious preoccupations, which shaded into mysticism, make her a
fascinating subject for biography in our increasingly secular age. But despite
its modern instrumentation and approach to its material, including use of a
silent dancer, La Passion de Simone
is more of a straightforward oratorio than any sort of in-depth psychological
or intellectual exploration of Weil’s life and works. Dawn Upshaw, for whom the
role of Simone was originally written, is a fine soprano soloist, and Esa-Pekka
Salonen conducts the choral and orchestral forces with a sure hand, but La Passion de Simone never really catches
fire. It is a bit too devoted to its subject, a bit too determined to make her
life fit into the artificial “stations of the cross” framework, and ultimately
not particularly gripping through much of its length (it runs more than an
hour). The high-quality performance and some interesting musical elements earn
this release a (+++) rating, but La
Passion de Simone is unlikely to catch on as a major choral, much less
religious, work for our time.

The new Naxos CD of the
music of Mohammed Fairouz (born 1985) also gets a (+++) rating: it has high
points and effectively intense moments, but much of the music sounds
predictable and not particularly distinctive. The six works here are all world
première recordings, and
collectively they give a rather comprehensive portrait of this young and
prolific composer, who favors vocal musicbut has also written four symphonies (and much else) to date. But it is
not generally the vocal works here (such as Tahwidah,
for soprano and clarinet, and Posh,
for a male singer who can handle both baritone and tenor ranges, with piano)
that convey the most passion in either a secular or religious sense; rather, it
is the instrumental ones that recall Fairouz’ Egyptian heritage and mourn the
victims of events there that plumb greater depths. True, For Victims for baritone and string quartet, his lament for those
who died in the Egyptian revolution, is certainly heartfelt and effectively
constructed, if somewhat predictable in its emotional flow. Also true, even when
not writing vocal music, Fairouz seems to strive toward vocal forms, as in Chorale Fantasy for string quartet. But
the most-effective pieces here are the most purely instrumental: Jebel Lebnan, written for and
beautifully played by the Imani Winds and built around a central lamentation that
feels more intense than those expressed vocally; and Native Informant, a five-movement solo-violin sonata written for
Rachel Barton Pine and, again, excellently played by the performer for whom it
was created. This piece too has a central movement, called “For Egypt,” that
reaches out beyond specificity toward a general sense of connectedness with
social and political troubles in every nation and every era.When he taps into widely felt emotion of this
sort by exploring his own feelings – that is, his passions – about specific
events in and related to Egypt, Fairouz writes affecting and effective works
that come across better than his somewhat over-earnest vocal settings. Since he
is still in his 20s, it is reasonable to expect that his style and the
emotional trappings of his music will evolve and develop over time, from a
foundation that has already produced some very well-constructed music.

March 21, 2013

The Three Little Pigs and the
Somewhat Bad Wolf. By Mark Teague. Orchard Books/Scholastic. $16.99.

Perfectly Percy. By Paul
Schmid. Harper. $17.99.

Monsters Love Colors. By Mike
Austin. Harper. $15.99.

T-Rex Trying… By Hugh Murphy.
Plume. $13.

Here are four books that the
author/illustrators clearly had a great deal of fun inventing – resulting in
plenty of enjoyment for young readers (ages 4-8) who dip into the creators’
worlds. Mark Teague’s The Three Little Pigs
and the Somewhat Bad Wolf is the umpteenth retelling of the familiar story
of the three pigs who build houses of different materials, here twisted so that
the wolf is misunderstood and harmless and ends up embarrassed and admitting
that he only huffed and puffed because “I was so hungry I could not think
straight.” What sets the plot going here is the decision by a farmer and his
wife to move to Florida: the farmer “paid the pigs for their good work and sent
them on their way.” The first pig loves potato chips and builds a straw house
so he has plenty of money left over for his favorite snack; the second adores
“sody pop” and builds a house of sticks because “sticks are practically free,
so he had lots of money left over for sody-pop.”The third pig – the only girl – is the
practical one who builds a strong brick house and plants a garden, too,
harvesting vegetables instead of consuming junk food (although she is the same
size as the other pigs!).The “somewhat
bad” wolf gets angry after he comes to town and finds restaurant after
restaurant closed to him. By the time he stumbles upon the pigs’ houses, he is really hungry, which is why he tries the
whole huff-and-puff routine. “I can’t believe that worked!” he says after he
blows down the straw house – while the pig speeds away on his scooter. The
second pig gets away on a bicycle after the wolf blows and blows again and is
“amazed” when it works. But of course the technique fails at the brick house,
and the pigs take pity on the exhausted wolf, and the four all end up living in
that house as friends. The wolf “was hardly ever bad again,” Teague writes in
closing a book whose words and pictures alike provide a very pleasant new twist
on a very old story.

Perfectly Percy has a more-prickly protagonist – a porcupine. And
the problem here is not huffing and puffing but popping: Percy loves balloons,
but cannot prevent them from falling victim to his quills. Percy is drawn
adorably: he is almost all quills,
his body is egg-shaped, and he has little black dots for eyes and very short
arms and legs and a completely winning smile. But Percy does have a problem
with those balloons: “HAPPY little porcupines with balloons are soon SAD little
porcupines.”Percy knows he has to come
up with a solution to this problem – “Percy thought he must think,” as Paul
Schmid puts it. But Percy cannot figure out what to do, and his sister, Pearl,
is no help – all she does is stick marshmallows on Percy’s quills, resulting is
an absolutely adorable picture but no answer to the balloon issue.Percy’s mom is too busy to help, so Percy
goes back to thinking on his own, and after a day and night without ideas, he
suddenly comes up with a solution at breakfast. It is a very messy solution, to
be sure, but a hilariously apt one and “a perfectly Percy idea” that young
readers will love (although parents should be sure not to let their kids
imitate Percy too closely).

Speaking of messes, Mike
Austin’s Monsters Love Colors looks
like one from start to finish – there are scribbles and blotches and splats of
color all over every page. It is all the fault of monsters – not very
monstrous-looking ones, but certainly very messy and very colorful ones. The
book is a celebration of colors, primary and mixed, starting with blue, red and
yellow monsters that “mix, dance and wiggle” all over the page while smaller
grey monsters peek at the goings-on. The big monsters first affirm their
choices for favorite colors: red (“the color of ROAR!” and other things),
yellow (“the color of HOWL!” and more), and blue (“the color of Scribble and
Dribble” and so forth). Austin letters his words in different sizes, different
shapes and different places all over the pages, adding to the sense of
monstrous chaos while, in reality, carefully controlling the placement of
everything here. Then the big monsters ask the small ones, one by one, “What
new favorite color can we make for you?” And the small ones, one at a time, ask
for orange, green and purple – which the big monsters create through color
combinations, giving kids reading the book a quick lesson in the world of art
and color amid the general messiness. The smallest grey monster, left for last,
becomes frustrated (“I was supposed
to say PURPLE!”) – but when his turn to pick a color finally comes, he
proclaims what he wants with such intensity and in such large letters that
colors and monsters go flying all over the page, or actually two pages. And then come two further pages
that are filled with mixing and squishing and wiggling and dribbling, until the
smallest monster ends up as – a rainbow!Part art book, part study in design, part silliness for its own sake, Monsters Love Colors is 100% fun and not
even slightly monstrous, except perhaps for being monstrously delightful.

And why should kids have all
the fun with monsters and colors and silliness? Hugh Murphy’s blog about a sad-sack T. Rex trying
to get along in the modern world has now spawned a book about all the things
this extinct monster is trying to do – everyday things that are simply beyond
the abilities of the “tyrant lizard.”The problem, in most of Murphy’s concepts and drawings, comes from the
well-known and still-not-understood fact that this gigantic dinosaur had
enormous legs coupled with two tiny, armlike structures, each with only two
claws – structures that appear completely useless, even vestigial, so out of
proportion are they to the rest of the dinosaur’s body. The fun of Murphy’s
book, whose drawings are black and white with a small splash of red or pink to
draw attention to one element or another, comes from imagining T. Rex trying to
contort his body to do things that we puny humans take for granted. Pick
flowers?How, with that huge body and
those tiny arms? Count to five? But the “arms” have only four fingers between
them. Do a cartwheel? Out of the question. Serve himself food from a salad bar
with a sneeze guard? Pull down the trap-door cord to get into the attic? Use a
drive-through ATM or a public restroom’s hand dryer?Everything is pitifully and very amusingly
impossible – there is no way the small arms and bulky body can possibly go
together for cross-country skiing, pulling a parachute’s ripcord, playing the
bongos, flossing, playing the flute…The
list goes on and on, amusingly and sometimes hilariously, as Murphy manages to
make T. Rex’s face just expressive enough to convey a mixture of frustration
and resignation. Not all the drawings work – some rely simply on the dinosaur’s
body size, such as “trying to play hide & seek,” and are not especially funny.
But some are gems, such as one showing T. Rex struggling to ride a motorcycle
or a bicycle – then succeeding with a unicycle (which has no handlebars) – and
then facing frustration again when trying to pump up the unicycle’s tire.The wholly unrealistic and wholly ridiculous
modern-world antics of this long-gone apex predator are those of a monster for
our own time – one that modern life has cut down to size.

Stardines Swim High across the
Sky, and Other Poems. By Jack Prelutsky. Illustrated by Carin Berger.
Greenwillow/HarperCollins. $17.99.

The New Kid on the Block. By
Jack Prelutsky. Drawings by James Stevenson. Greenwillow/HarperCollins. $9.99.

A Pizza the Size of the Sun.
By Jack Prelutsky. Drawings by James Stevenson. Greenwillow/HarperCollins.
$9.99.

There are poems for
all ages – and not always the ages for which you expect them. Anyone who thinks
of the late Maurice Sendak as a children’s-book creator will surely think again
after reading, and looking at, My
Brother’s Book. This is the final completed work by Sendak (1928-2012), and
it is adult on every level. Drawing on verbal imagery from Shakespeare’s
difficult and puzzling late play, The
Winter’s Tale, and using an illustrative style reminiscent of that of
William Blake, Sendak here offers a dense 24 pages of art and verbiage that
jointly celebrate and mourn the closeness of brothers in general and that of
Sendak himself and his own older brother, Jack (1924-1995), in particular.This is a book about “continents of ice,” a
book in which a star “scorching the sky” tears brothers asunder, a book about a
monstrous bear that is and is not the constellation Ursa Major, a book about
the power of riddles and stories, the power of love and the irreconcilability
of yearning for someone who has passed on.It is quite unlike any other book that Maurice Sendak ever wrote, and is
emphatically not for children – perhaps not for most adults, either.Mysterious and pervaded with sadness even as
it describes and shows transformations that seem to lead at last to warmth and
peace, My Brother’s Book is a
curiosity and an oddity, a book that Sendak’s many fans will find puzzling and
disturbing and that fans of poetry and art will find strange and evocative.

Jack Prelutsky’s poems
are far more straightforward and aimed squarely at children – sometimes ages
4-8, as in Stardines Swim High across the
Sky, and sometimes ages 5-10, as in the new paperback editions of The New Kid on the Block and A Pizza the Size of the Sun.In Stardines
Swim High Across the Sky, nature gets a makeover, whether the subject is
astronomy (in the title poem) or whether Prelutsky is punningly writing about
“poor boring chormorants” (which “labor over senseless chores” all day),
ever-messy “slobsters,” effervescent “jollyfish,” or the irritating
“tattlesnake,” which is “Acting so wrong,/ Sticking your snout/ Where it
doesn’t belong.”Carin Berger’s offbeat
collages go particularly well with these Prelutsky gems. The tattlesnake, for
example, is shaped and patterned like a rattlesnake (complete with rattle), but
sports an old-victrola-style, trumpet-shaped horn at the front; the “gloose”
has feathers and wings, yes, but its body is made of a tube of glue; and
“fountain lions” resemble big cats with decorative water displays atop their
heads. The poems here are all short, and the rhymes and meter are often very
clever: “The sobcat is sad/ As a feline can be/ And spends its time crying/
Continuously.”The portmanteau words
that are the names of these odd creatures immediately and amusingly describe
their habits, whether Prelutsky is creating a “bardvark” (an irritating
poetical creature) or a “panteater” (a long-tongued consumer of “mountains of
pants”).

Nor is the “panteater”
the only Prelutsky creation that endangers that particular article of clothing.
In The New Kid on the Block,
originally published in 1984, one of Prelutsky’s longer poems, “The Carpenter
Rages,” is all about the man’s problems with – what else? – carpenter ants,
which eat his tools one by one and move on from there: “The carpenter suddenly
leaps in the air,/ he writhes in a furious dance,/ for those carpenter ants,
with incredible flair,/ have eaten the carpenter’s pants.” The immediately
recognizable art of James Stevenson enlivens this book as well as A Pizza the Size of the Sun, which was
first published in 1996.In The New Kid on the Block, readers will
meet (or, if they are parents, perhaps re-meet) the ever-battling Mungle and
Munn; find out what happened “When Tillie Ate the Chili” (featuring an
especially amusing Stevenson drawing); commiserate because “Suzanna Socked Me Sunday”;
and discover the Zoosher, which hangs out “with mashed potatoes on its eyes,/
with fried zucchini in its nose,/ with carrot sticks between its toes,” and so
on.Some of the short poems here (which
have entirely apposite illustrations) are just right: “Throckmorton Thrattle
has charm and class,/ he’s wealthy and he’s handsome,/ small wonder that his
looking glass/ is holding him for ransom.”Other, longer poems sometimes fall all over themselves with absurd lists,
as when a boy’s mother tells him, among other things, “Do not squeeze the
steamed zucchini!/ Do not make the melon ooze!/ Never stuff vanilla yogurt/ In
your little sister’s shoes!” And Prelutsky, abetted by Stevenson, is just as
clever in A Pizza the Size of the Sun,
where “Dester Dixxer mixed elixir/ in his quick elixir mixer,” and where “I
made something strange with my chemistry set,/ something all gluey and blue,/
something a little like half-scrambled eggs,/ mingled with vegetable stew.”
Here are “Herman Sherman Thurman” and “The Improbable Emporium” and “Opossums”
and “An Unobservant Porcupine” and “Mister Pfister Gristletwist.”The prolific Prelutsky seems to have an
unending ability to have fun with language and concepts, plus unceasing delight
in creating the most improbable characters and situations possible – then
describing them so they come to thoroughly illogical but always-amusing poetic
life.

Everything Goes: Henry on Wheels.
Text by B.B. Bourne, based on the Everything
Goes books by Brian Biggs. Illustrations in the style of Brian Biggs by
Simon Abbott. Harper. $16.99.

Pete the Cat: Play Ball!
Created by James Dean. Harper. $16.99.

Pete the Cat: Pete’s Big Lunch.
Created by James Dean. Harper. $16.99.

The “I Can Read” series from
HarperCollins Children’s Books is neatly divided into five levels, which have
considerable overlap but are distinct enough so parents and teachers can easily
use them to help new readers along effectively. The “My First” books are
particularly useful in this respect. Intended for ages 4-8 – an age range that
overlaps that of the later Levels 1-4 but that makes perfect sense on its own –
these books feature familiar, easy-to-understand characters in modest
adventures that have very little plot but plenty of pleasant illustrations to
move the simple stories along. The books are frequently based on well-known
children’s works and characters, modified for very young readers by people who
sometimes receive credit for their work (as in Henry on Wheels) and sometimes do not (as in two new Pete the Cat books).

Henry on Wheels is a pleasant updating of the Dick-and-Jane-style
books that brought earlier generations into reading. It is simply the story of
Henry’s first solo bike ride and all the things he notices: “Henry rides down
the street. Henry sees kids swinging. Henry sees kids sliding and playing in
the sand.” And so on. The book follows all the modern dictates of early and
easy readers: multiracial and multi-ethnic characters, helmets on bike riders
and construction workers, and far more things to see than would likely show up
in a short ride around the block in the real world. Henry at first thinks the
around-the-block ride will be “boring,” although of course he agrees to be safe
and do what his mother says; and at the book’s end, Henry and his mother go
biking together to have lunch at some of the places that Henry rode past during
his adventure. Really, not much happens here, and not much needs to – the
simple drawings and repetitious words make it easy for beginning readers to
follow along and get a feeling of accomplishment as they absorb the story.

Pete the Cat has more
personality than do Biggs’ characters, and the two Pete books accordingly have
a bit more plot. Play Ball! is almost
an anti-sports book, but in a good way: it is about a baseball game between the
Rocks and the Rolls, and while the Rocks (Pete’s team) win, the focus is on
what Pete himself does – or fails to do. He strikes out the first time he comes
to bat. “But Pete is not sad. He did his best.” In his second time at bat, he
gets a walk even though he wanted a hit. In the field, he gets under a fly ball
and it goes into his glove, but he drops it; later, he makes a catch, but then
throws the ball too far. And in his one time on base, he is thrown out when
trying to score a run. But the refrain of “he did his best” keeps the book
moving, and Pete’s super-wide eyes may droop (they always droop) but never show
any hint of unhappiness, much less tears. The book reinforces the idea of being
part of a team and doing the best you can – even if that is not very much. On
the other hand, what Pete can do is
make a sandwich, as he shows clearly in Pete’s
Big Lunch. Pete is so hungry that he starts with an entire loaf of bread
and begins adding pretty much everything he can find to it, from a whole fish
to an apple, two hot dogs, a can of beans and more. Eventually the sandwich –
which is topped with ice cream (“three huge scoops”) – gets too big for Pete to
eat, so he invites all his friends to share it with him, and it turns out to be
enough for everybody. The message here, “sharing is cool,” is tacked on at the
end and is not integral to the plot in the way “he did his best” is to Play Ball! But Pete’s Big Lunch is a more amusing book, and kids will enjoy seeing
the absurd mixture of ingredients Pete uses in his sandwich as it grows and
grows and grows.All three of these “My
First” books are pleasant, simple, nicely illustrated and created with just
enough plot so that beginning readers (and pre-readers on the cusp of managing
books on their own) will find them a fine first step into a lifetime of reading
enjoyment.

If a book could make life
perfect, how many times would life be
perfect; if a book could make relationships perfect, how many times would Leil
Lowndes, all by herself, have created perfect relationships? Well, how many
times has she done that? The fact
that the question is unanswerable is what makes it possible for Lowndes to
continue spinning her advice about instant connections, ending shyness,
becoming a “people magnet” (an unappealing image, when you think about it), making
“anyone” fall in love with you (also an unappealing prospect if considered too
closely), and now: How to Create
Chemistry with Anyone. It is hard to argue with the success with which
Lowndes has “branded” herself, in the sense of creating a brand of advice and
self-help with which she is identified. She assembles a variety of ideas, some
of them good and some of them dicey, relating to communications strategies, and
then parcels them out – supposedly in refined and purified form – to show
readers how to manipulate other people into doing what they, the readers, want.
Of course, Lowndes does not put it that way, but in fact what she does is tell
people how they can take command of relationships and other situations,
arranging things to their liking and pulling the other person along, presumably
against his or her will (at least initially).

If you put things this way,
Lowndes’ guides scarcely sound benign, but of course she does not put things this way. How to Create Chemistry with Anyone includes
such unexceptionable advice as understanding that the heady feelings of initial
love and strong sexual attraction last two years or less, so you must build a
firmer foundation for a long-term relationship; being sure that you and your
partner share similar values and beliefs; connecting with someone who will be
reliable in case of trouble – and being such a person yourself; encouraging
each other’s growth, personal and professional; reserving time to have fun with
each other, no matter what the pressures of everyday life may be; and so on.Very nice; very straightforward; and very
much not the “sizzle” for which
people will come to this book.What
people will want are the 75 “chemistry sparkers,” delivered in small boxes
scattered around the pages. Number 5: “Give your quarry ‘family eyes.’” Number
31: “Nudge your quarry’s neurons with a double name whammy.”Number 63: “Show you share or respect your
quarry’s values.”Oh yes, this is a hunt
– not every “sparker” includes the word “quarry,” but many do.And there is plenty of explanatory material
to expand on the short “sparker” entries. In a chapter called “How to Spark
Cyber Chemistry,” for example, Lowndes writes, “Girl, let’s say a Hunter writes
you a cool message. You write an even cooler one back. You text a bit and then
plan to talk. So far, so good. Visions of romance and maybe happily-ever-after
dance through your head. But stop. None of these pleasures will be part of your
future if he doesn’t like your image.”This is the expansion and elucidation of “sparker” number 13: “Photo
Tips—Show character in your face and have an appealing background.”Coolness and a with-it style simply ooze from
Lowndes’ writing, which she directs sometimes at men and sometimes at women. In
fact, she emphasizes gender differences: “Huntresses, you are more romantically
intuitive than males are, and you’re natural pleasers.”As for men: “Women don’t come with pull-down
menus and online help,” as one chapter subsection says.How to
Create Chemistry with Anyone is very entertaining and written in an expertly
breezy style that makes the book sound superficial even when dealing with
serious and well-thought-out subject matter. Typical advice, from “sparker”
number 61, “Don’t talk when he’s fuming,” goes like this: “Huntresses, between
his limbic system being wired to the physical rather than the linguistic, plus
evolution, plus his upbringing, plus ten times more testosterone, what do you
expect? Ignore and forgive your Quarry’s outbursts.”The whole “Spark your Quarry” thing (and
“Spark the Chemistry” and similar phrases) goes beyond simplistic into silly,
and the frantic level of communicative amusement with which Lowndes delivers
her prose swings wildly from funny to rather sad. Readers taken in by the style
of How to Create Chemistry with Anyone
probably won’t notice that, though, or won’t care. What they will want to know
is: does this stuff work? The answer is that it surely works some of the time
and surely fails some of the time, just like every other one-size-fits-all
approach to relationships, psychology, and life in general.

Speaking of which: how about
making romantic connections starting in high school – say, at prom?Or how about using prom as a way to build on an
existing romance? Lauren Metz’ The Prom
Book is all about having the world’s most fabulous time in, like, forever, by doing everything right from
prom planning to after-prom memories. Oddly enough in a book aimed at teenage
girls, Metz offers more-sober writing than does Lowndes, offering – for example
– a “perfect prom workout” in which you can “sculpt your biceps for strapless
or one-shoulder dresses,” and/or “get sexy legs for short dresses,” and/or
“work your glutes and abs for body-hugging dresses.” These are actually
sensible exercise programs, and they come with sensible notions in other areas,
too: “Three ways to eat out for less” suggests skipping or splitting appetizers,
choosing a restaurant with large portions so you can share, and drinking water
rather than overpriced soft drinks.The
assumption here is that prom is rather sweet – Metz tells girls how to “brush
off pressure to have sex” – and that the prom itself should ideally be just one
part of a remember-forever experience: “Ready for the next round? The fun won’t
fade when you host a fab after-party! (Warning: With these tips, you may even
one-up the dance!)”The practical stuff
here is mixed with that sort of over-the-top enthusiasm, as Metz explains how
to put together a budget and plan your look (for which her flow chart is both
amusing and practical); decide whom to go with; figure out makeup and
hairstyles; and deal with potential seeming-disasters such as a ripped dress or
broken zipper. This is a short book – its apparent 160 pages are much reduced
by many blanks for notes: “Navigating the Dating Situation” has four pages of
advice and six blanks, for instance, and the last 17 pages of the book are offered
as places for looking back and writing down details, such as “favorite moments”
and “most embarrassing moments.” And eight of those final pages are reserved,
very oddly in an age of digital photography, for photos.Well, The
Prom Book will not be all things to all people, or even to all star-struck
(or prom-struck) teenage girls, but it does do a good job of combining a veneer
of knowing sophistication with an undercurrent of anticipatoryexcitement – all of which is right in line
with prom itself.

Despite critic Eduard
Hanslick’s persistent denigration of Bruckner’s symphonies in comparison to
those of Brahms, there are actually many ways in which the symphonies of these
composers are similar, not superficially but harmonically and even structurally.
However, these two fine sets of live performances, each containing four
symphonies, highlight the works’ differences in some exceptionally striking
ways. Paavo Berglund (1929-2012) here commands only a 50-piece orchestra, far
smaller than most of those playing Brahms nowadays and, indeed, much smaller
than most (although not all) that played Brahms in the composer’s own time. Brahms’
symphonies are robust, even heavy – capable of sounding muddy and turgid, but
monumental and elegant at their best. They are scarcely candidates for
lightness and transparency, but hearing them in that mode is a fascinating
listening experience. The middle voices, which get short shrift most of the
time in these works simply because it is difficult to bring them out without
mis-balancing the orchestra, peek through Berglund’s performances again and
again with seeming effortlessness. Timpani resound and punctuate the music
without having to be struck with undue force. Woodwinds do not seem to be
straining to be heard through massed strings. The Chamber Orchestra of Europe
actually sounds relaxed in these performances: no section appears to be pushing
to make itself stand out above the others. Berglund paces the symphonies well,
and once the initial oddity of lighter-sounding-than-usual Brahms wears off,
what emerges are very well-constructed performances that date to 2000 and still
sound very good indeed.

This is not to say that
Brahmsian grandeur is always unmissed.The
second movement of No. 1 has a lovely, yearning quality made more poignant by
the small string section, and the violin solo comes through absolutely
beautifully; but the finale’s opening minutes are less fraught and mysterious
than they can be (although the pizzicato
passages come through with exceptional clarity), so when the horns “clear the
air,” there is less contrast than needed to be fully effective, and the main
theme simply sounds thin. The finale is simply not as impressive as usual here.
In No. 2, the first movement lacks the broad warmth that a larger string
section would provide, but still sounds quite lovely. The central section of
the third movement works particularly well with the reduced orchestra. And the
finale, interestingly, has a very full sound – the orchestra scarcely seems
reduced in size at all. No. 3 has the warmest sound in the symphonies, so the
transparent texture of the opening is quite surprising; but it soon proves very
satisfying, providing structural clarity and a welcome sense of openness
through the first two movements. The third and fourth movements do sound thin,
however, with the gorgeous strings of the finale almost too chamber-music-like
in feeling to be fully effective. The ending is evanescent rather than calming
after turbulence – a justifiable interpretation, but one that takes some
getting used to. In Symphony No. 4, which in many ways is the grandest of the
set, the reduced orchestra proves surprisingly advantageous, helping bring out
the work’s ties to Bach and the Baroque era. The clarity of lines in the first
movement comes through very well indeed, and the sectional balance in the
second movement is unusually clear. The third movement, its style unique in
Brahms’ symphonies, has real flair here, and the finale is quite remarkable:
clean, clear and beautifully balanced. In fact, the Fourth is the most
successful symphony in this release, and fully justifies the idea of performing
Brahms’ symphonies with a much smaller orchestra than is the norm.

A few conductors, notably
Mario Venzago, have also tried the reduced-orchestra approach in the music of
Bruckner, but most continue to seek the biggest possible sound for Bruckner’s
music, and there is no sound bigger than that of three of the world’s best
orchestras: the Royal Concertgebouw and the Vienna and Berlin Philharmonics.
One of the great pleasure of Nicholas Harnoncourt’s performances of Bruckner’s
Third, Fourth, Seventh and Eighth Symphonies is the chance to hear all these
superb ensembles under the same conductor, each orchestra with its own
marvelous massed and burnished sound but each sounding quite different from the
others. The recordings date to different years – No. 3 to 1995, No. 4 to 1998,
No. 7 to 1999 and No. 8 to 2001 – but that is not why the orchestras sound
different. It is hard to realize at a time when so many orchestras, especially
in the United States, seem actively to seek a homogenized sound that, however
good, is largely indistinguishable from the equally good sound of other
orchestras, but the top European orchestras still cherish their individuality
and use differing sonic production as a way of keeping their performances
distinctive. Hearing these three marvelously full-throated orchestras in
Bruckner’s music is a pleasure of the first degree. These are big performances, fully in the spirit of
Bruckner turning the orchestra into a sort of super-organ – although that
concept is by no means always accepted these days. In fact, these performances
are somewhat on the old-fashioned side, with Harnoncourt emphasizing the massive
sonorities that these orchestras can produce and positioning Bruckner’s music as
a sort of grand sonic cathedral. In three of the four performances, this works
extremely well. No. 3 (heard here in the 1877 edition) has a very Wagnerian
sound even though the “Wagner Symphony” does not, in this version, contain all
the operatic quotations that Bruckner originally included. The work builds and
builds again, becoming an imposing edifice that strives ever-higher until its
culmination in a finale of rare power and tremendous scope. No. 4 – which,
along with No. 3, is played by the Concertgebouw Orchestra – is equally
impressive. Heard in its usual version (1878/80), it is flowing, warm and
involving, its beauties more relaxed than those of No. 3. The Concertgebouw’s
exceptionally warm strings and beautifully balanced sections produce an elegantly
emotive performance that builds effectively while letting the symphony’s
manifest beauties come through quite clearly.

The sound is quite different
for Bruckner’s Seventh as played by the Vienna Philharmonic. This remains, as
it has been for many decades if not longer, an astonishing orchestra, no
section inferior to any other, all constantly playing at the top of their game
and all melding into a smooth, gorgeous and unforgettable sound immediately
recognizable as Viennese. The strings are as smooth as butter but never
cloying, their sound washing over listeners in great waves of beauty punctuated
by equally fine and equally well-modulated contributions from winds, brass and
percussion.The Seventh is one of only
two Bruckner symphonies to exist in a single edition (the Sixth is the other),
so all orchestras play the same music, which means that the Vienna
Philharmonic’s clear superiority in sound and in communicating the “Bruckner
experience” is due to the orchestra’s intrinsic skill rather than to the circumstance
of presenting a better or worse edition of the music. The pacing here is
excellent, the sound unexcelled, and simply sitting back and letting Bruckner’s
Seventh wash over you as thematic group follows thematic group and beauty
follows beauty is a splendid experience. The sole somewhat-disappointing
performance in Harnoncourt’s set is of Bruckner’s Eighth, heard here in the
1892 edition (not 1888 or 1890). The edition itself is not the best, and the
playing of the Berlin Philharmonic – whose brass section is unexcelled for
warmth and perfect unison – is certainly not a problem. But Harnoncourt seems
to lose his way in this very expansive symphony. There is a lack of rhythmic
precision in the first movement; the Adagio feels draggy, although it is taken
at a reasonable tempo; and the finale does not come across as a capstone – it
drifts and nearly comes apart into sections before Harnoncourt finally pulls
everything together in the coda. This four-CD set is nevertheless highly
impressive, and the chance to hear such outstanding orchestras – and such large
ones – performing Bruckner is every bit as thrilling and fascinating as the
opportunity to experience Brahms played by a much smaller ensemble than is
customarily heard in his symphonies.